Galactic Collision Scenario

[Thraxis]

Batman, if you want to beam someone INTO the ship, you need to beam through the hull. Sure, the transporter would *work*, but unless you have an exterior cargo bay, it wouldn't help. As such, its only real use would be for moving stuff around within a hangar or room, in which case both the temperamental nature of the transporter, and the size/cost/power requirements are all far in excess of what a common, cheap binary load lifter would get you, making it highly impractical for menial labor replacement as well.

[Batman]

No you don't. You need to beam through the hull only when there's NO RECEIVING TRANSPORTER. Which there WOULD be in cases where they actually WANT transporters to work.

[Thraxis]

I will ask, though, what evidence we have for transporters being able to act in this fashion is available. I mean, as I understood it, it was a matter of send matter-stream from point A to point B, integrating back into a whole on the other side. As such, anything which would stop the transmission (including shields, hulls, etc) would stop transporters entirely. Afterall, whenever transporters are blocked, it has been because of the writers' deus ex machina, and so we have never been given (to my knowledge) any ability to deduce that simply putting the receiver on the outside of the ship would help, especially because I am not aware of any evidence provided on the size of the receiver required.

But please, if you have evidence to the contrary, please present it.

[Batman]

The very existence of the pattern buffer.
To elaborate, the above mentioned means that you can both store AND move transported material without any actual transportation being involved.

[Thraxis]

True, though the question still remains: how big would the receiver have to be? For all we know, the receiver is taking up a good portion of the area around the transporter room. Having something of that size exposed beyond the outer hull could quite possibly defy all logic of engineering.

[Wyrm]

I will ask, though, what evidence we have for transporters being able to act in this fashion is available. I mean, as I understood it, it was a matter of send matter-stream from point A to point B, integrating back into a whole on the other side. As such, anything which would stop the transmission (including shields, hulls, etc) would stop transporters entirely. Afterall, whenever transporters are blocked, it has been because of the writers' deus ex machina, and so we have never been given (to my knowledge) any ability to deduce that simply putting the receiver on the outside of the ship would help, especially because I am not aware of any evidence provided on the size of the receiver required.

But please, if you have evidence to the contrary, please present it.

Symbiosis. Two transporter setups were connected end-to-end to transport through the sputterings of a sun in its active phase.

However, it requires a transporter setup on both ends, so for this trick to be really useful, ST-style transporters will have to be common. However, for them to be common, you'd have to find a use for them that does not require them to otherwise be common. I also don't remember how long it took to set this trick up.

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The very existence of the pattern buffer.
To elaborate, the above mentioned means that you can both store AND move transported material without any actual transportation being involved.

Patterns in a pattern buffer can't be stored forever. Under normal circumstances, you'd have to pop it out within about ten minutes or you lose the pattern. I suppose this is useful to move stuff from transport chamber to transport chamber within the same ssytem, but why would you need to do that? Unless you're talking about something else.

[Batman]

You're already having the system do more than I intend I'm merely talking about moving WHATEVER it is that gets stored in the buffer from a transporter receiver array on the hull to the actual transporter pad.
AS I've said from the word go it WOULD need transporters on both ends so the applications would absolutely be limited, but it DOES mean Wars hull density does not AUTOMATICALLY bar ship-to-ship beaming.

[Wyrm]

Of course not. However, this stunt requires there to be a transporter on both ends, and thus to work reasonably well, for there to be enough legitimate use for transporters for them to be common on ships. This is a significant barrier to entry if they have little other use.

[Captain Seafort]

Symbiosis. Two transporter setups were connected end-to-end to transport through the sputterings of a sun in its active phase.

However, it requires a transporter setup on both ends, so for this trick to be really useful, ST-style transporters will have to be common. However, for them to be common, you'd have to find a use for them that does not require them to otherwise be common. I also don't remember how long it took to set this trick up.

They did the same thing in "Realm of Fear", with the implication that it's unusual enough that Barclay had to suggest it but not so unusual that they needed to make major changes to the system - just push a few buttons and they were away.

[Batman]

Of course not. However, this stunt requires there to be a transporter on both ends, and thus to work reasonably well, for there to be enough legitimate use for transporters for them to be common on ships. This is a significant barrier to entry if they have little other use.

Oh I agree. I was exclusively addressing the TECHNOLOGICAL viability of such a setup, nothing more.

[Simon_Jester]

OK. As I said, I was very busy last week.

My response to Wyrm is largely independent of anything anyone else said here, so I'm going to split this into two parts; the reply to Wyrm is going to need some fairly careful composition. This is the other part.

Canon at least partially differs with you there. In the cutscene showing the bombardment of Taris, the shots are seen covering a several hundred (thousand?) square mile radius. I make this assessment by the fact that the firepower was being directed all across a city that looked to be approximately similar is size to at least the US, at least relative to the planet, that is.

Zoomed out from planetary orbit, that's how it would look: "Target those hundred square kilometers over there, those five hundred over there, these structures that the native Tarisians might commandeer in an attempt to shoot back... oh, and that building, I never liked that building anyway."

The fact that their bombardment is spread over a wide area does not mean they are merely spraying and praying.

I think Malak is thorough enough in his vengeance to continue bombarding the planet after he's even sense her leave, even if *just to make sure*.

He might. On the other hand, if his flagship is the only capital ship remaining in orbit and he's got somewhere else to be, he might not; I don't really know Malak's character well enough to be sure. He might try to Base Delta Zero a planet for giggles when the military objective has flown the coop, or he might not.

However, I would like to point out that I don't contend that technical stasis was absolute between 4000 BBY and 25 ABY, only that it was like the differences between, say, 1990 and 1960. There were differences, but the differences were not so great that people from one era would be completely lost at sea in the other. Small potatoes compared to, say, Information Age/Iron Age (or Star Wars/Star Trek) technological gaps.

A computer engineer from 1960 wouldn't understand the first thing about computers nowadays. He would probably look at my laptop and say, "Where's the vacuum tubes?" It isn't the common people who are always affected by radical technological increases, it's the people who build the stuff. Just because it doesn't look the same on the outside, and just because it doesn't affect how it's used, doesn't mean that it hasn't changed significantly from an engineering or technological standpoint.

You missed two points. One is that I said "between 1990 and 1960." A lot of the things that would seem extremely strange to someone from 1960 was either far less common or not invented in 1960, and a fair amount of hardware still in use still dated back to the '60s or '70s.

The other is that much of the implemented technology of 1990 already existed in potentia in 1960. A computer engineer of 1960 might not immediately understand a 1990 computer, but you could explain it to him. Semiconductor transistors were invented in the late '40s or early '50s, and integrated circuits in the late '50s. You could say "Vacuum tubes have become obsolete while you were asleep. This thing has all its computations handled by a microminiaturized integrated circuit etched onto a big hunk of silicon," and it would make sense in his frame of reference, assuming the guy you were talking to was in touch with the state of his art at the time he did his Rip Van Winkle act. You might have to define an integrated circuit, but the guy would still be able to accept that it could be used in place of vacuum tubes if he wasn't stupidly conservative.

The idea of integrated circuits powerful enough that computers might viably fit in someone's lap would be impressive as hell, but it wouldn't be an "Ohmigod the Martians have landed!" thing the way the same computer would be in, say, 1910 (when even vacuum tubes were new, and "computer" meant "guy who is good at math.")

Now, if we move from 1990 to 2010 the picture changes... but by 2010 we're starting to see technological artifacts that are clearly different not only in degree (smaller, faster, cheaper) but in kind from what was available in 1960, even in principle. Cell phones, anything and everything to do with the Internet, the beginnings of genetics-based medicine (in 1960 the awareness that genes were based on DNA was still relatively new, and no one had done anything worth mentioning with it)... you get the idea. You could still explain these things to a visitor from the past, but they'd sort of have to take your word for the details of implementation, much as someone from 1800 would have to take the word of someone from 1950 about how electric generators worked.

What I'm saying is that the visible, obvious gaps in technological artifacts from 4000 BBY and 25 ABY are more like the differences between 1960 and 1990 (or possibly 2010) than they are like the difference between 1800 and 1990. They're there, they're real, they're undeniable, but they're not so big that someone transplanted from one era to the other wouldn't be able to figure out what was going on. They'd be thinking "Wow, I'm in the future, and it's like home only cooler!" and not "What is this hellish place? I don't understand! Aaaah!"
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I do have to disagree here, though. Who in their right mind would program a spaz? I'll just let that sink in.

I'm not saying a protocol droid shouldn't be quite intelligent, but frankly, C3-PO acts like a damn moron in a lot of ways. Maybe not subsentient, but not nearly as smart as something that can keep track of several million languages ought to be. It's as if he were programmed by an eight year old child or something...

Technology is an advance in engineering. Science lays the groundwork for engineers on how things work, but technology and engineering are the SAME THING.

Yes. But some pieces of technology represent a breakthrough in knowing what to make, not in our fundamental understanding of the universe. Microwave cavities, for example, weren't in serious use until the mid-20th century, but there was nothing lacking in our basic understanding of the universe* or our manufacturing abilities** to stop us from building them in 1905. It wasn't what we didn't know, it was what we hadn't invested the time and sweat to do it, because the incentive to build it hadn't been established yet.

*Maxwell's Laws, Bessel functions, things like that.
**Decent machining, of quality that improves as the quality factor of your cavity goes up.

"Breakthrough in engineering" probably isn't the right word for that kind of thing; "breakthrough in invention" is closer. But the thing about breakthroughs in invention is that they are very easy to catch up with, because you're catching up with the idea that you need something, not with the fact that you don't have the physical means to create it. Now, not all technology reflects breakthroughs in invention; but quite a bit of it does to one degree or another, and that's one of the main reasons that technologically backward nations ever catch up at all.
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I disagree that we can use it for any basis of comparison. For all we know, the KotOR era took days to do what a modern SW ship could do in hours. We simply do not have evidence to fully argue in either direction.

No, only partially: it did not take years, or even many months. That is all we know, but that alone sets an upper bound on just how much hyperdrive travel could have advanced in the intervening millenia.

The idea that they can just hook up an arm to the old one's place and have it function properly with as much (or at least almost as much) dexterity while attaching directly to existing neurons, even to the extent of feeling pain is HUGE. YOU may not see that as huge, but believe me, it is an INCREDIBLE break through. Nerves aren't just some wire that you can hook up another wire to, they are MUCH more complicated that that.

Yes. But taken in isolation, when where it was the only part of the prosthetic limb system that had not already been invented by 4000 BBY, it is not an enormous advance of technology as a whole. Hooking up nerves to wires or fiber-optic cables is a huge deal on the scale of individual technological breakthroughs, the sort of thing that justly gets you remembered for centuries. But it is also a highly specific deal, the sort of thing that might be achieved in fairly short order by the Republic Senate throwing money at a problem.

If none of the other parts of the system (working droid limbs, a thorough knowledge of anatomy, basic prosthetics) had been present in 4000 BBY, this would represent an enormous technological change. But that is not the case.

For that matter... if the stuff inside the game is to be believed, there were already a variety of "implants" and devices that interfaced directly with the nervous system on the market- you could buy a small arsenal of them in the game.

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--Transporters
Even if we ignore the EM radiation, it's well known that funny ore, even dense substances can block transporters. It has been theorized by the great Mike Wong that transporters might not even work through SW hulls, let alone through their shields (discussed during the putting-down of transporters as all-powerful weapons). If this reasoning is sound, it may be that transporters can't get through the hulls of SW ships, which would mean that putting a transporter in a ship would be useless since all you would be able to do is transport something within a room, maybe within your ship at most. Now THAT is a dead niche.

--Nails and Armchairs
LOLZ. I can't believe that you actually went there, Jester. I hope you understand why this rebuttal is so funny.

Right.

Look, I don't expect transporters to work as a powerful weapon of war and I never did, not against any opponent smart enough to figure out how to bang two pieces of uranium together to make fire*, but I find it hard to believe that the enormous Trek/Wars technological gap is worth nothing when it comes to making that type of technology more reliable. The most obvious limitation of transporters is their extreme sensitivity to interference in all its glorious variety: EM, gravitational, intervening layers of material, and so on.

If any effort ever went into improving transporters, I would expect it to go there. And if the guys who have overwhelmingly better computer support and a far better understanding of the principles of field manipulation set about trying to build interference-resistant transporters, I'd expect them to have at least some success, especially for direct pad-to-pad applications. So I think that Star Wars could build transporters good enough to be useful for some of its purposes if they got the idea to do it; Trek engineering capabilities are a subset of theirs, and even they can almost do it, as demonstrated by all the cases where their people figure out how to bypass the Transporter Problem of the Week using the Clever Technobabble of the Week.

Even in Star Trek, we see clear evidence of different levels of transporter capability between powers at different levels of technology: in their first encounter with the Federation in "Q Who?," the Borg can beam boarding parties straight through Enterprise's shields as if they weren't even there.

So I'd expect the first Star Wars engineer who looks at a transporter to first say "Hmm. Surprisingly clever given the overall chipped-flint state of your technology," followed immediately by "Holy crap, you mean to tell me you built this without X, Y, and Z? It's a miracle it works at all! You must have transporter malfunctions every other week!" followed by a private "Hell, I could do better than this... you know, maybe I could market a better-than-this design to the cargo lines. Worth taking a crack at the blueprints, if nothing else."

I can't prove that, because I don't have an exhaustive catalog of Star Wars or Star Trek engineering techniques. But I don't think the idea is outright silly. "Star Trek transporters are insanely unreliable" is absolutely true, but the notion that it must always be true independent of the technical capabilities of the people building the transporter is an axiom, not a conclusion.

*What can I say? Overkill, but it works...

[Simon_Jester]

Wyrm, either you're being one hell of a lot more ferocious in defense of your own position than its quality warrants, or you're trying to throw a false double standard of evidence at me..

On the one hand, you demand evidence that I prove sub-millennial time scales for a Trek catchup to Star Wars technological levels given exposure to their superior technology. On the other, you deny that such evidence can exist and reject out of hand any argument that involves even attempting to quantify technological progress, without offering any viable alternative evidence that would support your own conclusions beyond "the origins of technology in Star Wars were a very long time ago."

You rationalize this as:

Not surprising, as I know I can't prove that it will take millennia to my satisfaction, let alone yours. All I've been doing is knocking down your arguments and showing that your position has just as much foundation.

I will assume for the sake of argument that this is sincere, but it presents an obvious problem: you're making a false assumption about the level of certainty I've been applying to this from square one. Since I didn't explicitly throw out massive sheet anchors, I suppose I invited that; I didn't expect I'd have to when I got into this back on page three with

...over timescales of decades and extended social interaction it does matter. People from Star Trek societies will move heaven and earth to send some of their children to school in Star Wars societies, or hire tutors from those Star Wars societies. Assuming they're not simply exterminated en masse or kept in a perpetual technological quarantine by a powerful force willing to spend great resources to keep them primitive*, sooner or later they will start catching up. While it will almost certainly take multiple lifetimes (considerably longer than Japan needed) it will not take millenia. They do not have to independently reinvent everything, and they are not stupid enough to mistake advanced technology for unlearnable magic...

If you had presented me with any reasonable argument in favor of the idea that it has taken tens of millenia of technological progress at the rate we in the developed world today are accustomed to to reach the Star Wars status quo, I would have accepted your position of millenia being needed to catch up without question. I do not feel you have done so. Nothing we actually see in Star Wars leads me to expect technological progress at that rate, except perhaps in the form of punctuated equilibrium: short bursts of rapid, crisis-motivated advance interspersed with long periods of stagnation or gentle decline.
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Having presented me with no such arguments, you then lambaste me for trying to come up with some of my own. For instance, I am presumed to be such a complete fool as to think that energy manipulation is correlated exactly with technological development, as opposed to being merely roughly correlated over historic time scales. Power generation is commonly used as a measure of progress by historians of industry and technology for a reason, you know.

But this does not matter; surely I must be saying that the wattage per cubic meter of a power plant is driven by a constant times the number of knowledge-units one has! Naturally, electrical power generation has nothing to do with any measurable state of technological advance; it's not as if the power density you can achieve on a mobile platform affects what that platform is capable of. It's as uncorrelated as apples and oranges...

Likewise you find fault with my attempt to gauge the rate of progress in Star Wars by comparing points widely separated in time, arguing that I have neglected to allow for the possibility of technological regress as well as progress. As far as I can tell, this is predicated on the idea that a backwards nation trying to catch up to an advanced one must follow the course of the advanced nation's development in lockstep, having little decade-long Dark Ages to mimic the century-long Dark Ages of its role model.

What matters is not how long the advanced power took to get where it is, but how far it had to go, how much missing knowledge it must fill in, as your own simplified exponential model illustrates.
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Since I assume you are well aware of these issues, being roughly as educated and intelligent as I am at a lower bound, I begin to wonder if you ever bothered to consider my arguments seriously. And by this I do not mean believed my arguments, I mean noticed them. It is quite possible to take consider ideas only to refute them in a matter of moments... but this requires that you actually be able to tell the difference between "sane but wrong" and "heresy to be dismissed without engaging the forebrain." There is a difference between finding an excuse to disagree with someone and finding a reason.

Given where we are, it's perfectly natural for you to bombard me with contempt if you have a reason to disagree with my arguments. But it appears that all you have is a string of excuses, motivated by an attempt to take my best guess as dogma and then show that the supposed dogma really is a guess.

Fine. It's a guess. One that I'm relatively confident of, and that I feel is at least supported, if not proven, by back-of-the-envelope calculations. But still a guess, in a sense that, say, the theory of relativity is not.

I knew it all along; I suppose I have only my own writing skills to blame for the fact that you didn't.

[Thraxis]

Zoomed out from planetary orbit, that's how it would look: "Target those hundred square kilometers over there, those five hundred over there, these structures that the native Tarisians might commandeer in an attempt to shoot back... oh, and that building, I never liked that building anyway."

The fact that their bombardment is spread over a wide area does not mean they are merely spraying and praying.

I disagree. The rate that the fire is landing, and the fact that the fire was not localized into smaller areas, simply hitting all across the surface of the mega-metropolis, we can see that either one hit is sufficient to take out any point target (which is almost certainly untrue given that a single shot couldn't even completely destroy a single civilian building when watching from the surface), or he couldn't be sure where the jedi had gotten to, and thus wanted to blast everything to hell to make sure it was *impossible* for her to evade death by random chance. Especially if he was so inclined to target specific points, why would Karath be so worried about the men on the planet? Afterall, precision strikes could easily ignore any garrisons present.

He might. On the other hand, if his flagship is the only capital ship remaining in orbit and he's got somewhere else to be, he might not; I don't really know Malak's character well enough to be sure. He might try to Base Delta Zero a planet for giggles when the military objective has flown the coop, or he might not.

If you have an enemy who can turn the entire tide of a battle by herself without even stepping into the fray, do you think you would stop if you thought there was even a remote chance that your senses were wrong and that she was still down there? The very fact that Malak was willing to destroy a planet that had the potential to drastically affect his economic and political position (afterall, Taris was known as the "Coruscant of the Outer Rim") just to kill one person tells me that he would be willing to finish it off, too, if there was even a slight chance she could still be there.

As for a BDZ, the whole point with me raising KotOR in the first place, is that I doubt a BDZ would be within the power of the ships shown. For Malak's intent, I doubt that he would go for full slagging, but smashing all the buildings in the mega-metropolis would be well within his power, and given what we see in the cutscene, it would likely only take a few minutes to reduce the city to rubble.

You missed two points. One is that I said "between 1990 and 1960." A lot of the things that would seem extremely strange to someone from 1960 was either far less common or not invented in 1960, and a fair amount of hardware still in use still dated back to the '60s or '70s.

True, computers weren't quite as advanced in 1990 as they are today, but besides flash memory and USB connectors, i doubt much has changed besides the actual CPU capability and size. As such, I was referring to *modern* as the current era of computing, not necessarily as today. Further, using your own semantics against you, by saying 1960 you proclude any inventions that take place in the mid to late 60's or the 70's. This includes middle and large scale integration circuits. As such, tell me that someone on the leading edge of technology would understand how you create microprocessors with over a million transistors when you are experienced with chips dealing with a couple dozen. And those are the actual figures for 1960 versus 1990. If it were today, they would have to contend with around 10 billion on a single chip. Just because he would understand the basic concept of silicon-based integrated circuits doesn't mean he would understand the first thing about how one would go about building something when your integrated circuits would be on the order of a few millionths of a meter in size (assuming a 1000x1000 grid, and a chip size between 1 cm and 1 mm). Further, the microprocessor (an integrated circuit which serves as an entire cpu in of itself) was invented in the late 60's/early 70's. Overall, just because a person could understand the basic principles, doesn't mean that he would be able to fall into line, and especially doesn't mean that he would be able to construct it if he were to suddenly reverse his Rip Van Winkle act.

The idea of integrated circuits powerful enough that computers might viably fit in someone's lap would be impressive as hell, but it wouldn't be an "Ohmigod the Martians have landed!" thing the way the same computer would be in, say, 1910

Going from enormous bigger-than-my-dorm-room computers that spit out ticker-tape to computers with about as much (or more) memory and RAM that show a visual representation of the files (what we call a desktop) that can fit on your lap, and, with one cord, can allow you to exchange information with other people all over the world... I think that could seriously make a person wonder what aliens helped us out. Especially our shiny disks that can hold more information than an entire hard drive of a computer of his time.

Now, if we move from 1990 to 2010 the picture changes... but by 2010 we're starting to see technological artifacts that are clearly different not only in degree (smaller, faster, cheaper) but in kind from what was available in 1960, even in principle. Cell phones, anything and everything to do with the Internet, the beginnings of genetics-based medicine (in 1960 the awareness that genes were based on DNA was still relatively new, and no one had done anything worth mentioning with it)... you get the idea. You could still explain these things to a visitor from the past, but they'd sort of have to take your word for the details of implementation, much as someone from 1800 would have to take the word of someone from 1950 about how electric generators worked.

--The internet was already existent in 1990. It had not yet been commercially shown to the public, but there were already megabit per second connections, TCP/IP protocols and networks, and even email existed in the 80's. In 1991 the first public attention was drawn to the internet, and by 1993 the internet was beginning to go to the public, rather than existing as a government/academic concept.
--DNA had already been developed and had received precedent in forensic investigations by 1990. Recombinant DNA was given a patent in 1980.

Neither of these technologies is any newer than computers themselves from now compared to 1990. The only difference is that they are more visible now. You mistake visibility for technological advancement. The DNA profiling of the 90's is very much like the DNA profiling of now (forensically speaking), it's used the same way, it's function remains the same, etc. As such it is visibly static. The only major differences lie in the efficiency, the amount of biological material required, and other technological changes. This is a very good example of how technology can increase tremendously without the difference being that pronounced. Also, try flash drives versus floppy disks. Both are placed into a drive designed to support them, both carry information, both are readable and writable. Functionally, and by all visibility to an outside observer, they would seem to be identical. IBM's 23FD 8-in floppy disk from 1971, however, had a storage of 79.1 KB. This means that my 16 GB flashdrive in my pocket contains over 200,000 times the data. Would you claim that that is not a massive increase in technology, especially for not being any different cosmetically?

What I'm saying is that the visible, obvious gaps in technological artifacts from 4000 BBY and 25 ABY are more like the differences between 1960 and 1990 (or possibly 2010) than they are like the difference between 1800 and 1990. They're there, they're real, they're undeniable, but they're not so big that someone transplanted from one era to the other wouldn't be able to figure out what was going on. They'd be thinking "Wow, I'm in the future, and it's like home only cooler!" and not "What is this hellish place? I don't understand! Aaaah!"

Technology and visibility are very different. What you fail to consider is that, as pointed out above, just because TECHNOLOGY increases drastically, doesn't mean that it has to change how people live. ipods are cosmetically the same cd players, which are cosmetically the same as walkmen. The fact that we have advanced from cassetes to CD's to digital audio files hasn't changed how the product is used (not including the fairly recent addition of video files to the mix, which still isn't present in all mp3 players). Flash drives act as CD's which act as floppies from a cosmetic perspective. Hell, 3-1/2 inch floppies look a lot like 8 inch floppies, yet one holds 3-6 times the other.
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I'm not saying a protocol droid shouldn't be quite intelligent, but frankly, C3-PO acts like a damn moron in a lot of ways.

First, as anyone who plays a d20 RPG (or most other RPG's for that matter) would know, Intelligence (book smarts) and Wisdom (street smarts/common sense) are two VERY different things. Secondly, 3po was programmed for diplomacy and translation. He is programmed to try to approach situations from an angle of tact and culture. He is not programmed to deal with the crap he is commonly thrust hip-deep into.

Yes. But some pieces of technology represent a breakthrough in knowing what to make, not in our fundamental understanding of the universe. Microwave cavities, for example, weren't in serious use until the mid-20th century, but there was nothing lacking in our basic understanding of the universe* or our manufacturing abilities** to stop us from building them in 1905. It wasn't what we didn't know, it was what we hadn't invested the time and sweat to do it, because the incentive to build it hadn't been established yet.

Thank you for finally agreeing. This is what I have been saying.

"Breakthrough in engineering" probably isn't the right word for that kind of thing; "breakthrough in invention" is closer. But the thing about breakthroughs in invention is that they are very easy to catch up with, because you're catching up with the idea that you need something, not with the fact that you don't have the physical means to create it. Now, not all technology reflects breakthroughs in invention; but quite a bit of it does to one degree or another, and that's one of the main reasons that technologically backward nations ever catch up at all.

Easy to catch up only if you are within the same ball-park as the tech leader.
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For that matter... if the stuff inside the game is to be believed, there were already a variety of "implants" and devices that interfaced directly with the nervous system on the market- you could buy a small arsenal of them in the game.

Most of these were mostly "place it here and let it stimulate the nerves there". That's not interaction. It's easy enough to prod a piece of the brain with a probe and create a response, the difficulty comes from simulating a response in a non-central area (such as giving Luke's prosthetic hand full tactile sensation), or in letting the brain remotely control the prosthesis through its own nerves. Implants could easily be like throwing a brick at something to dust it. Further, the fact that it requires feats (KotOR I) or a high constitution (KotOR II) to have implants suggests that it does not play well with the body. Further, the very fact that we don't hear about implants during any time after KotOR suggests that there is some reason why they would go out, or why you don't see more people in the game with implants. If they can give an advantage, you'd think that the bounty hunters and such would snap em up. The most logical reason I can think of would be that they are dangerous. I mean, common sense would dictate that shoving a piece of metal into your head or torso or spleen would have risks, and the very fact that you need a high con to take one means that there are probably significant rejection consequences for something so invasive.

=========

Look, I don't expect transporters to work as a powerful weapon of war and I never did, not against any opponent smart enough to figure out how to bang two pieces of uranium together to make fire*, but I find it hard to believe that the enormous Trek/Wars technological gap is worth nothing when it comes to making that type of technology more reliable. The most obvious limitation of transporters is their extreme sensitivity to interference in all its glorious variety: EM, gravitational, intervening layers of material, and so on.

If any effort ever went into improving transporters, I would expect it to go there. And if the guys who have overwhelmingly better computer support and a far better understanding of the principles of field manipulation set about trying to build interference-resistant transporters, I'd expect them to have at least some success, especially for direct pad-to-pad applications. So I think that Star Wars could build transporters good enough to be useful for some of its purposes if they got the idea to do it; Trek engineering capabilities are a subset of theirs, and even they can almost do it, as demonstrated by all the cases where their people figure out how to bypass the Transporter Problem of the Week using the Clever Technobabble of the Week.

This assumes that there IS a way around it. Not all problems can be engineered around. If I said "I want to shine a laser at a mirror, and have it touch the wall behind the mirror, how will you modify the laser to do that? Assuming that you don't want to amp the laser until it melts the mirror (along with anything along the path that the laser is reflected off the mirror in), there is no way to make the laser jump past the mirror. And as for the "Clever technobabble of the week", there are plenty of times when there IS NO technobabble solution. Sometimes, the problem hindering the transporter has no solution, and simply negates the transporter.

Even in Star Trek, we see clear evidence of different levels of transporter capability between powers at different levels of technology: in their first encounter with the Federation in "Q Who?," the Borg can beam boarding parties straight through Enterprise's shields as if they weren't even there.

1.) ST shields are phased. All the borg would have to do is get the transporter in phase, and they could beam straight through the shields as they did.
2.) The borg have already shown how adept they are with shields. Shield draining weapons, personal shields, the ability to walk through force fields, etc. It would be of no surprise to me that borg could find a way to breach the Enterprise's shields.
3.) SW shields have shown no evidence of being phase dependent, and are actually inclined not to be (see Mike's shield discussion). Further, we have no evidence that the borg can beam through any of the interference, damping fields, funny ore in the hills that transporters also have trouble with.

"Hell, I could do better than this... you know, maybe I could market a better-than-this design to the cargo lines. Worth taking a crack at the blueprints, if nothing else."

3 months later: "Damn, well, I guess there's a reason this technology was shelved. Urban centers, mining centers, and even starships themselves stop it. Oh well..."

"Star Trek transporters are insanely unreliable" is absolutely true, but the notion that it must always be true independent of the technical capabilities of the people building the transporter is an axiom, not a conclusion.

The idea that every technology *can* work around its critical weaknesses is a misjudgement. Try making a gun without recoil, for instance. Newton's Third law means that there will always be recoil, and the more powerful you try to make it, the more recoil you will have. This is one limiting factor as far as hand held weapons goes. Afterall, beyond a certain power level, the recoil could shear the wielder's arm off. I'm not saying that a .50 caliber sniper rifle isn't superior to an 18th century colonial musket, but both firearms now and then share this similar limiting flaw. Further, guns don't work well being shot into water. The transition from air to water causes any supersonic bullet to shred itself almost harmlessly. Even sub-sonic rounds are slowed quickly. This was actually proved on an interesting episode of Myth Busters. In this case, it would actually be more effective to use a 19th century revolver or a primitive bow and arrow to kill someone under water than to use a brand-new, 21st century sniper rifle. In this case, it would be more practical to go BACKWARDS in technology since the way forwards (faster, bigger bullets) would actually be counterproductive. The case with transporters could be easily the same way. The technology increase generating EM radiation, the widespread use of super-dense alloys, and other such factors could easily make such a fickle technology as transporters obsolete. As such, they take a step back to using shuttles to get where they need to go.

Further, since most ships in star wars would be stopping in the port to resupply and get some R&R before heading back into space, they likely wouldn't *need* to cut out the time for landing by using transporters. Afterall, unlike ST, SW ships usually aren't multi-purpose to the extreme of dealing with military, scientific, passenger carrying, and cargo hauling duties. Most cargo haulers have the ability to land, and are actually supposed to land (unlike the fed ships, which never give that impression). So whereas fed ships need transporters as almost a necessity to keep themselves supplied, SW ships would largely not need them. Military vessels seem to be the only ships large enough to require loading from space, but they are also designed to have communication scramblers, incredibly thick and dense hulls, and dedicated shield generators. The designers may not even think of the out-of-battle needs of supplying, and the nature of the incredibly thick, dense hull would likely negate transportation capabilities entirely. Further, any world urban enough for a warship to seek resupply would likely be urban enough to have interfering EM pollution. Combined with an utter lack of military benefits (given the massive signal jamming every cap ship already possesses, and the massive shields), transporters could easily have absolutely no use.

[Wyrm]

Wyrm, either you're being one hell of a lot more ferocious in defense of your own position than its quality warrants, or you're trying to throw a false double standard of evidence at me..

... or because of ignorance or natural stupidity you fail to understand that arguing against your position only requires that I show you have not satisfied your own burden of proof. I choose this third option.

On the one hand, you demand evidence that I prove sub-millennial time scales for a Trek catchup to Star Wars technological levels given exposure to their superior technology.

You have chosen a very hard position to substantiate. Why are you finding it hard to believe that I demand equally hard evidence?

On the other, you deny that such evidence can exist and reject out of hand any argument that involves even attempting to quantify technological progress,

In my eyes, your "attempt" to quantify technological progress is clumsy and juvinile, as it involved equating power with knowledge. The joke aside, they are in no way commesurable.

without offering any viable alternative evidence that would support your own conclusions beyond "the origins of technology in Star Wars were a very long time ago."

Then you have misunderstood my position and my argument, and I have credited you with far more intelligence than you deserve. My position of "your analysis is flawed and your conclusion cannot be taken seriously" requires only showing the flaws in your analysis and that they invalidate your conclusions.

You rationalize this as:

Not surprising, as I know I can't prove that it will take millennia to my satisfaction, let alone yours. All I've been doing is knocking down your arguments and showing that your position has just as much foundation.

I will assume for the sake of argument that this is sincere, but it presents an obvious problem: you're making a false assumption about the level of certainty I've been applying to this from square one. Since I didn't explicitly throw out massive sheet anchors, I suppose I invited that; I didn't expect I'd have to when I got into this back on page three with

...over timescales of decades and extended social interaction it does matter. People from Star Trek societies will move heaven and earth to send some of their children to school in Star Wars societies, or hire tutors from those Star Wars societies. Assuming they're not simply exterminated en masse or kept in a perpetual technological quarantine by a powerful force willing to spend great resources to keep them primitive*, sooner or later they will start catching up. While it will almost certainly take multiple lifetimes (considerably longer than Japan needed) it will not take millenia. They do not have to independently reinvent everything, and they are not stupid enough to mistake advanced technology for unlearnable magic...

Please note the bolded part. You put your money down on a specific claim: that the former Federation and chums will catch up within a single millenium if they go balls out. There is nothing that justifies this position.

If you had presented me with any reasonable argument in favor of the idea that it has taken tens of millenia of technological progress at the rate we in the developed world today are accustomed to to reach the Star Wars status quo, I would have accepted your position of millenia being needed to catch up without question. I do not feel you have done so.

Apparently, you cannot tell the difference between arguing for my own position and arguing against yours. PROTIP: I am doing the latter. I am arguing that your analysis has too many flaws for us to take your conclusion seriously. This kind of argument only requires that I show that your analysis has numerous, serious flaws that invalidate your conclusion. Anyone with a pair of eyes can easily see that I was only using the opposing 'long' position as a rhretorical tool for arguing against yours.

Now, what have I been doing in my debate with you?

That's right.

I've been showing the flaws in your argument, and showing how they invalidate your conclusion!

Funny how things like that work out.

Nothing we actually see in Star Wars leads me to expect technological progress at that rate, except perhaps in the form of punctuated equilibrium: short bursts of rapid, crisis-motivated advance interspersed with long periods of stagnation or gentle decline.

Why do you find the position this unreasonable? Knowledge has been effectively removed from the galaxy at least once, and probably twice. We have only snapshots of the technology in the EU, whose events only (and sporatically) cover the last 5000 years of the galaxy — all the other parts of the SW timeline we know of come from references in the EU. Indeed, only the period of 40 BBY on can be considered to be well-covered. Only ten books cover the entire period of 5000-44 BBY. The pre-5000 BBY period is not covered first-hand at all.

We see very little of the nuts and bolts of SW science at all, to wit the galaxy's peer review literature. Does the galaxy publish a few tens of papers in a thousand years, or untold billions a week in any particular field? This is the real way to measure knowledge growth, which for the SW galaxy is very much a question mark. Same with ST.
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Having presented me with no such arguments, you then lambaste me for trying to come up with some of my own. For instance, I am presumed to be such a complete fool as to think that energy manipulation is correlated exactly with technological development, as opposed to being merely roughly correlated over historic time scales. Power generation is commonly used as a measure of progress by historians of industry and technology for a reason, you know.

But this does not matter; surely I must be saying that the wattage per cubic meter of a power plant is driven by a constant times the number of knowledge-units one has!

Except that is exactly the kind of assumption you need to make in order for your argument to work. Whether or not you purposefully said such is irrelevant — the very structure of your argument demands it.

Naturally, electrical power generation has nothing to do with any measurable state of technological advance; it's not as if the power density you can achieve on a mobile platform affects what that platform is capable of. It's as uncorrelated as apples and oranges...

There is a big difference between an abstract measure of technological progress to tell who's ahead of who in the technological savvy game and a precise metric telling how much (in particular units of knowledge) that technology is ahead of the other. Telling who would win a war only requires the former; telling how much time a society needs to achieve that level of tech requires the latter.

Likewise you find fault with my attempt to gauge the rate of progress in Star Wars by comparing points widely separated in time, arguing that I have neglected to allow for the possibility of technological regress as well as progress. As far as I can tell, this is predicated on the idea that a backwards nation trying to catch up to an advanced one must follow the course of the advanced nation's development in lockstep, having little decade-long Dark Ages to mimic the century-long Dark Ages of its role model.

Oh god. Do you seriously think that was the point, you moron?

The point, you cretinous little clown, is that your method of finding the coefficient of knowledge growth in the Star Wars galaxy, β, is deeply flawed. Not only does it assume that an increase in power implies a proportional increase in knowledge — and hence, "inherits all of the problems of your analysis of α" — but it neglects that there are documented subtractions of galactic knowledge, again meaning that my model is deficient in many significant ways... which I warned about right when I presented the damn thing.

Apparently, you have taken my mere illustrative toy model as a serious proposition. I had hoped that you would be smart enough to take the hint that the damn thing had very severe limits, but apparently I need to be more direct: the exponential knowledge growth model is a gross oversimplification of the situation at hand, useful only to characterize the problem, not to actually solve it.

There has been absolutely no argument from me that the Federation must recapitulate the history of the Republic and/or its prehistory. You made that shit up all by yourself.

What matters is not how long the advanced power took to get where it is, but how far it had to go, how much missing knowledge it must fill in, as your own simplified exponential model illustrates.

Yes. It is. No one is arguing differently. But you attempted to use years spent learning that knowledge as an indirect metric of that knowledge, rather than a more direct measure like the number of bits the knowledge takes to encode. Now, there's nothing wrong with using years as a measure of knowledge, but it does have consequences for how you relate the rates of knowledge learned and knowledge discovered. Namely, that the amount of time that it takes a civilization to learn the knowledge given a teaching civilization is roughly proportional to the amount of time that the teaching civilization spent discovering that knowledge in the first place.
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Since I assume you are well aware of these issues, being roughly as educated and intelligent as I am at a lower bound, I begin to wonder if you ever bothered to consider my arguments seriously. And by this I do not mean believed my arguments, I mean noticed them. It is quite possible to take consider ideas only to refute them in a matter of moments... but this requires that you actually be able to tell the difference between "sane but wrong" and "heresy to be dismissed without engaging the forebrain." There is a difference between finding an excuse to disagree with someone and finding a reason.

Except I have been finding reasons to disagree with you, you little shit! For one thing, you used my model, an admittedly gross oversimplification of the problem at hand and only used to illustrate the general character of knowledge growth, as a serious model meant to be used — after I had given fair warning that the model was woefully inadequate to any practical application. And then you went about justifying your figures in a completely incorrect way, and quite frankly anyone with real brains would recognize it was wrong. You are the only one who hasn't engaged their forebrain.

Given where we are, it's perfectly natural for you to bombard me with contempt if you have a reason to disagree with my arguments. But it appears that all you have is a string of excuses, motivated by an attempt to take my best guess as dogma and then show that the supposed dogma really is a guess.

Your own words, you strawmanning asshole:

Assuming they're not simply exterminated en masse or kept in a perpetual technological quarantine by a powerful force willing to spend great resources to keep them primitive*, sooner or later they will start catching up. While it will almost certainly take multiple lifetimes (considerably longer than Japan needed) it will not take millenia. They do not have to independently reinvent everything, and they are not stupid enough to mistake advanced technology for unlearnable magic...

This was not a "best guess." You put your money down on a particular position. You know the rules of this forum.

Fine. It's a guess. One that I'm relatively confident of, and that I feel is at least supported, if not proven, by back-of-the-envelope calculations. But still a guess, in a sense that, say, the theory of relativity is not.

I knew it all along; I suppose I have only my own writing skills to blame for the fact that you didn't.

Yes, you do in fact have only yourself to blame for presenting your guess in a manner easily construed as a serious, defensible position on a discussion forum specifically set up for the purpose of discussing the positions of members. Sucks to be you.

[Simon_Jester]

I disagree. The rate that the fire is landing, and the fact that the fire was not localized into smaller areas, simply hitting all across the surface of the mega-metropolis, we can see that either one hit is sufficient to take out any point target (which is almost certainly untrue given that a single shot couldn't even completely destroy a single civilian building when watching from the surface), or he couldn't be sure where the jedi had gotten to, and thus wanted to blast everything to hell to make sure it was *impossible* for her to evade death by random chance. Especially if he was so inclined to target specific points, why would Karath be so worried about the men on the planet? Afterall, precision strikes could easily ignore any garrisons present.

A point. I suspect that the bombardment was not as indiscriminate as it appeared (in the sense of "hook our fire control up to a random number generator"), but you do make a good case for it being intended to continue until everything was rubble... which, come to think of it, was the end result in any event. However, Malak did not keep up the fire until the oceans boiled away into space and the last survivors in underground bunkers were dead, which suggests a limit either on the capability of his ships or on his actual intentions. Could be either.

If you have an enemy who can turn the entire tide of a battle by herself without even stepping into the fray, do you think you would stop if you thought there was even a remote chance that your senses were wrong and that she was still down there?

If you were Darth Malak, would you doubt your own senses enough to think of this? Malak is a textbook case of "this is your brain on the Dark Side;" he cannot be relied on to make optimal strategic decisions when he believes that his command of the Force has told him what to do.

As for a BDZ, the whole point with me raising KotOR in the first place, is that I doubt a BDZ would be within the power of the ships shown. For Malak's intent, I doubt that he would go for full slagging, but smashing all the buildings in the mega-metropolis would be well within his power, and given what we see in the cutscene, it would likely only take a few minutes to reduce the city to rubble.

In the aftermath, the bombardment is described as leaving no building over two stories standing; he does effectively destroy all the buildings. I think I was wrong about the pinpointing issue, though.
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True, computers weren't quite as advanced in 1990 as they are today, but besides flash memory and USB connectors, i doubt much has changed besides the actual CPU capability and size. As such, I was referring to *modern* as the current era of computing, not necessarily as today. Further, using your own semantics against you, by saying 1960 you proclude any inventions that take place in the mid to late 60's or the 70's.

Yes, I do. But as a general rule, while inventions made ten years from year X won't be known to someone of year X, they will be reasonable extrapolations from the science and technology that was known in year X. Integrated circuit boards powerful enough to drive computers did not exist in 1960, but they were a logical development of things that did exist. You could explain it with a sentence that was not functionally equivalent to "this works by magic" as far as your listener was concerned, without having to give them an extended lecture on physics just to get their attention.

Which is, as I've been trying to say, what I'm getting at. I'm not talking about our visitor from the past finding technological stasis, or being able to instantly observe and analyze every facet of every technological advance they see. I'm talking about them being broadly able to comprehend how technology has changed and why, fit the innovations into a frame of reference they understand, and adapt to function in the new, more advanced society. The time scale for this kind of thing in the twentieth century seems to me to be somewhere between twenty and forty years, depending on the exact period. What do you think it is?

Overall, just because a person could understand the basic principles, doesn't mean that he would be able to fall into line, and especially doesn't mean that he would be able to construct it if he were to suddenly reverse his Rip Van Winkle act.

True. Not saying they would. Only saying what I say above. If it's not true of 1960->1990, I'm being too generous in my estimates, in which case 1960->1990 was a crappy analogy. I should have used, say, 1930->1950, or possibly 1930->1960. Or 1990->2010.

The point remains that there are periods over which technological change is small enough that a person who jumped from one time to the other would not feel badly out of place, even if they didn't immediately grasp every detail of how things had changed and couldn't duplicate the changes at will. To me, the evolution of Star Wars tech from 4000 BBY to the movie era seems to be one of these: things undeniably change, but they do not change so much that it's like going from ox-carts to flying cars (or from Star Trek to Star Wars).
_______

Neither of these technologies is any newer than computers themselves from now compared to 1990. The only difference is that they are more visible now. You mistake visibility for technological advancement.

Visibility plays a large role in determining whether or not people will feel out of place when dropped into a more advanced society, though. Visible widespread use of the Internet changes the culture in ways that the mere existence of the Internet does not, as demonstrated by all the older people around today who still aren't comfortable with it.

Hell, my father was genuinely computer-savvy as a graduate student in the 1970s, and he still feels lost at sea on the Internet. Part of that is native paranoia, but part of it really is that stuff which was technical and only relevant if you specifically needed it then has become the underlying infrastructure of our entire society today. You can't compartmentalize computers out into a "high tech" category that is separate from "real life" anymore, whereas in 1990 you still could.

My original argument was about that 'out of place' feeling, and I maintain that there are practical limits on how far the underlying technology can change before the out of place aspect becomes significant. In our world, technology advances that far in less than a lifetime, and it shows when you see what happens to old people who don't make a conscious effort to move with the times. In Star Wars, it takes a lot longer.
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First, as anyone who plays a d20 RPG (or most other RPG's for that matter) would know, Intelligence (book smarts) and Wisdom (street smarts/common sense) are two VERY different things. Secondly, 3po was programmed for diplomacy and translation. He is programmed to try to approach situations from an angle of tact and culture. He is not programmed to deal with the crap he is commonly thrust hip-deep into.

True, but while it's easy to dismiss this as an intelligence/wisdom divide, in real life when we meet "low-wisdom" people, we rarely hesitate to think of them as stupid, rather than unwise. There's a reason for that: what RPG players call wisdom is an important part of general intelligence, and C3-PO doesn't have it.

C3-PO is best described, I think, as an idiot-savant whose savant field is language and communication styles. That creates a falsely exaggerated impression of his actual intelligence, because he sounds like someone who knows what he's talking about, until you actually stop to listen to what he's saying. And I don't think that's inconsistent with the description "not programmed to deal with the crap he's thrust into," either. A robot programmed to handle only one type of situations usually would be an idiot-savant, after all.

Thank you for finally agreeing. This is what I have been saying.

Oh, God, don't tell me this is another case of violent agreement. [bangs head against wall in frustration at own poor communication skills]

[Breakthroughs in invention are]Easy to catch up only if you are within the same ball-park as the tech leader.

Absolutely. But even if you aren't, you can catch up with the breakthroughs in invention they made 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, in much less time than it took them to make corresponding breakthroughs in the first place. Catching up will still take many years of effort; it's not easy. But it wouldn't even be possible if it weren't for the fact that duplicating technical infrastructure is easier than inventing it.

Side note: This, I think, is a common flaw in many computer strategy games that try to model civilizations. If my research falls behind early on, it will always be behind, unless I move heaven and earth to speed up.
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Most of these were mostly "place it here and let it stimulate the nerves there". That's not interaction. It's easy enough to prod a piece of the brain with a probe and create a response, the difficulty comes from simulating a response in a non-central area

True. I'm not saying the technology is mature. I'm saying that it exists, that they already have some clue of how to build devices that interface with the central nervous system to a limited extent. The refinement of that technology into something that can be used for fully functional prostheses is a major advance between the KOTOR era and the movie era, and I totally agree with you on that. But, once again, it's a "we award Dr. Bob the Galactic Lifetime Achievement Award for his groundbreaking work on prosthetics" advance, not a "that was the Stone Age, this is now when we have proper prosthetics" advance.

Further, the very fact that we don't hear about implants during any time after KotOR suggests that there is some reason why they would go out, or why you don't see more people in the game with implants.

There are a few counter-examples; the one I can think of off the top of my head is Lando Calrissian's chamberlain on Bespin. Also, the question of precisely what "human-cyborg relations" actually means, though it could mean anything or nothing and have nothing to do with implants, strictly speaking.

If they can give an advantage, you'd think that the bounty hunters and such would snap em up. The most logical reason I can think of would be that they are dangerous. I mean, common sense would dictate that shoving a piece of metal into your head or torso or spleen would have risks, and the very fact that you need a high con to take one means that there are probably significant rejection consequences for something so invasive.

Very likely, though you'd think the same would be true of prosthetics to some extent...
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This assumes that there IS a way around it. Not all problems can be engineered around.

True.

I'd still be surprised to see transporters rendered completely useless throughout a setting as diverse as Star Wars by problems that cannot be engineered around at all, since that strikes me as more a case of universe-designer fiat than of realism. But I cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they would not be rendered completely useless in this way. If you maintain that this is the appropriate standard of proof, then I have nothing more to say on the subject, save that for myself I'm not sure that one should consider that the appropriate standard of proof.

3.) SW shields have shown no evidence of being phase dependent, and are actually inclined not to be (see Mike's shield discussion). Further, we have no evidence that the borg can beam through any of the interference, damping fields, funny ore in the hills that transporters also have trouble with.

Yes, yes. I know. I'm giving a specific example because it's the best I can do without forcing myself to watch the Complete Star Trek and get back to you in two or three years. Sorry.

See my reply immediately above, about not being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

So whereas fed ships need transporters as almost a necessity to keep themselves supplied, SW ships would largely not need them.

I have an image of large droid-operated cargo ships using transporters for pad-to-pad transfer of cargo containers, sort of like container ships today. I'm not saying they WOULD exist; I'm only saying the idea comes to mind as a possible application if any applications are possible. I'd guess that some are possible, but I cannot prove my guess beyond a reasonable doubt to someone whose natural inclination is to dismiss the technology as useless.

[Simon_Jester]

Wyrm, either you're being one hell of a lot more ferocious in defense of your own position than its quality warrants, or you're trying to throw a false double standard of evidence at me..

... or because of ignorance or natural stupidity you fail to understand that arguing against your position only requires that I show you have not satisfied your own burden of proof. I choose this third option.

Your choice.

You have chosen a very hard position to substantiate. Why are you finding it hard to believe that I demand equally hard evidence?

Because I am no longer convinced that your notion of the hardness of the position matches reality. You can decide that my burden of proof is whatever you want, and you can arbitrarily add to this burden as many times as you want. But you could do this in any case, regardless of whether I was right or wrong*. Nothing stops a person who is wrong from saying "I need more evidence!"

Indeed, many of the stupidest ways to be wrong in the world do exactly that, because as far as argument goes, it's the defense in depth to beat all defenses in depth. You don't have to be right; all you have be is savvy enough to find a way in which your opponent could hypothetically expand on their argument, then demand that they do so indefinitely. Up to a point, this kind of behavior is well warranted; there is a reasonable standard of evidence for every claim. Beyond that point they become nothing more than an excuse for keeping up an argument for the honor of the flag until the other party quits in disgust.

You saw fit to invoke an argument against the validity of the model I was using. So far, so good. But the argument in question was one that lowers the effective amount of time and effort required to reach high technology from a low starting point... which would tend to support lower estimates for how long it would take to catch up over high ones. If you're trying to poke holes in my reasoning to show that I don't really have any, it seems odd of you to do so with arguments that support my conclusion and are in fact more generous than the ones I had adopted for the sake of the discussion.

You regard the fact that the exponential model does not factor in periods of regression as a decisive problem with both the exponential model and my reasoning, despite the fact that it favors my conclusion more than I do. That is an absurd objection: I am wrong because I forgot to include something that supports my conclusion. If you're willing to use absurd objections along with valid ones, then we could be at this for months, even if I was indisputably right by the standards of everyone debating the question in good faith.**

You can argue against my position for a very long time in this way, limited only by your own supply of foolishness, and you are more than clever enough to generate unlimited folly if you so choose.

*(or, since we're arguing about a nebulous fictional idea, probably-right or probably-wrong).
** Which I do not contend that I am, only that you do not meet those standards.
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Why do you find the position this unreasonable? Knowledge has been effectively removed from the galaxy at least once, and probably twice. We have only snapshots of the technology in the EU, whose events only (and sporatically) cover the last 5000 years of the galaxy — all the other parts of the SW timeline we know of come from references in the EU. Indeed, only the period of 40 BBY on can be considered to be well-covered. Only ten books cover the entire period of 5000-44 BBY. The pre-5000 BBY period is not covered first-hand at all.

I don't see anything wrong with that, but when we apply it, it only makes playing catch-up to them easier, not harder.

In this case, your own argument against my position doubles as an argument for my position, because it reduces the amount of time needed to reach the Star Wars level of technology from a primitive starting point. That cuts down on the amount of effort, because a galaxy clawing its way back out of the Dark Ages in a few millenia can't supply as many man-years of research (or research publications) as one that has been continuously hammering away at scientific problems progressively for twenty-five.

The point, you cretinous little clown, is that your method of finding the coefficient of knowledge growth in the Star Wars galaxy, β, is deeply flawed. Not only does it assume that an increase in power implies a proportional increase in knowledge — and hence, "inherits all of the problems of your analysis of α" — but it neglects that there are documented subtractions of galactic knowledge, again meaning that my model is deficient in many significant ways... which I warned about right when I presented the damn thing.

I contend that this is less of a problem with the model than you believe, as we can replace the entire Star Wars side of the model with a constant, provided we can estimate the magnitude of that constant relative to where the benighted Trekkers are, assuming an exponential growth curve in technology as a function of time on the Trek side of the line.

Of course, the model still works in terms of time and the products of technology, and not in terms of papers published or bytes of data stored; I'm not as certain that this is a critical problem as you are. If we were interested in discovery it would be critical; when nation A publishes only 1% as many physics papers as nation B it's a very safe bet that A is hideously backward in physics compared to B. If nation A is so limited as to have only 1% of the archived papers B does, even more so.

But when we are concerned with infrastructure development and the creation of tools to make the tools, the relation between volume of published research and the effort required to upgrade one's equipment to reflect that research is not so simple. A great deal of research may boil down to a single concept, process or technique that can be implemented without painstaking reconstruction of all the trial and error that went into the original version.

So long as we stay within the realm of technology human beings can learn to master at all, there will remain points at which an summary of the knowledge base up to a certain point is sufficient to proceed, even if one has not looked at everything that went into the summary. Otherwise progress in science and technology would already be nearly impossible; even reading all the literature on many subjects back to their earliest beginnings would take a prohibitive amount of time, let alone actually understanding it all.

We make up for that using textbooks and reference books that present the mass of literature in condensed form, even though the literature is already a condensed form of the labor that went into the original research and design work.

Claiming a linear relationship between the difficulty of creating a technological product and the number of research papers written on the subject before it could be created doesn't make more sense than claiming a linear relationship to electrical power output did; at least electrical power output is a technological product. Your objection would be valid if one had to master all the papers related to a device to use the device, or to build it. One does not, not when the blueprints already exist.

Fine. It's a guess. One that I'm relatively confident of, and that I feel is at least supported, if not proven, by back-of-the-envelope calculations. But still a guess, in a sense that, say, the theory of relativity is not.

I knew it all along; I suppose I have only my own writing skills to blame for the fact that you didn't.

Yes, you do in fact have only yourself to blame for presenting your guess in a manner easily construed as a serious, defensible position on a discussion forum specifically set up for the purpose of discussing the positions of members. Sucks to be you.

True.

Since I did not say it before in an obvious enough way for you to notice, I will make up the lack now:

I do not contend that this estimate of a <1000 year time frame for a Star Trek power to catch up with Star Wars level technology given exposure to that technology and freedom from outright conquest is a universal or certain truth. I believe it to be true, and I believe that rough calculations are at least somewhat supportive of it, but I do not possess a universally applicable model of technological advancement, or a complete enough dataset to provide a mathematical proof, in the sense that I could prove that, say... Spoiler

A uniformly filled ellipsoidal bunch of charge in a beamline will have a parabolic line charge density, with peak charge density &lambda;0 = 3qN/4zm, where N is the total number of particles in a bunch and zm is the longitudinal half-length of the bunch.

[Thraxis]

A point. I suspect that the bombardment was not as indiscriminate as it appeared (in the sense of "hook our fire control up to a random number generator"), but you do make a good case for it being intended to continue until everything was rubble... which, come to think of it, was the end result in any event. However, Malak did not keep up the fire until the oceans boiled away into space and the last survivors in underground bunkers were dead, which suggests a limit either on the capability of his ships or on his actual intentions. Could be either.

My original intention with this point was to illustrate that they likely couldn't boil the oceans and such. The overall statement "Could be either," however, seems to sum up where this particular debate has gone. I believe we have pretty much reached a consensus/stalemate that this particular instance can be argued in either direction, and thus I vote we suspend this debate for now.

If you were Darth Malak, would you doubt your own senses enough to think of this? Malak is a textbook case of "this is your brain on the Dark Side;" he cannot be relied on to make optimal strategic decisions when he believes that his command of the Force has told him what to do.

That said, though, you could just as easily say that his motives could be akin to "She got a ship? She must have had help from the surface! Punish them, punish them all!!!" Further, since this debate is only a derivative analyzing the motives of the above, I suggest we suspend this debate as well.

In the aftermath, the bombardment is described as leaving no building over two stories standing; he does effectively destroy all the buildings.

I appears we have reached agreement here as well. As such, note my suggestion for above sub-debates.
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You could explain it with a sentence that was not functionally equivalent to "this works by magic" as far as your listener was concerned, without having to give them an extended lecture on physics just to get their attention.

One problem, though, is that this assumes that they have someone teaching them. Especially in the scenario we are discussing, try sending an Englishman from the early 1800's (very start of the industrial revolution) and try to teach him how to build a computer. In order for him, or even a team of "hims", to build one from the modern day, they would need a helluva lot of knowledge. Afterall, computers work by having electricity either flow or not flow because of a couple silicon chips each contain a couple billion connections. Oh, and I might as well mention that silicon is an element, not a compound as you may have heard, and we use pure silicon mixed with a lattice of other atoms at roughly 1 part per million or such. Oh, what's an atom? I'm sorry, I forgot that wasn't proposed until 1803. How do we harness electricity? Well, there's motors and capacitors and, well, a whole bunch of stuff that was invented in the mid to late 19th century... Oh, and what's a billion? It's a number greater than the total number of people in your entire world. How do we put that many in? Well we usually use lasers, oh what's a laser? Etc, etc, etc. This is only 2 centuries of technology ahead of our current point, and you can already see how much time it will take to catch up. Now take the 25,053* years since hyperdrive was invented (not even including the hyperspace cannons and sleeper ships that existed before then). Even if half of SW was static tech speaking (10,000 year dark age enough for conservative figures?), and even if it takes less than one tenth of the time to learn the stuff and integrate it than it did to invent it in the first place, that still leaves over 1000 years to catch up.

[1]Which is, as I've been trying to say, what I'm getting at. I'm not talking about our visitor from the past finding technological stasis, or being able to instantly observe and analyze every facet of every technological advance they see. I'm talking about them being broadly able to comprehend how technology has changed and why, fit the innovations into a frame of reference they understand, and adapt to function in the new, more advanced society. [2]The time scale for this kind of thing in the twentieth century seems to me to be somewhere between twenty and forty years, depending on the exact period. What do you think it is?

[1] I understand. This just isn't enough to begin reproducing the technology in of itself. Afterall, there is a reason that we go to college for engineering degrees, and that is after having been immersed in modern technology and modern science since a young age. The main debate here isn't about sinking or swimming in a new environment, but being able to understand the properties that would allow a society to catch up technologically. To make a technology, you first have to understand the principles upon which it works.
[2] For an individual to be able to live effectively in the advanced time frame, or for a society to catch up? Also which period are you referencing? (we discussed several)

The point remains that there are periods over which technological change is small enough that a person who jumped from one time to the other would not feel badly out of place, even if they didn't immediately grasp every detail of how things had changed and couldn't duplicate the changes at will. To me, the evolution of Star Wars tech from 4000 BBY to the movie era seems to be one of these: things undeniably change, but they do not change so much that it's like going from ox-carts to flying cars (or from Star Trek to Star Wars).

This I have never argued. What I have argued, is that the technology has increased on the non-visible level. For instance, take the example of the flash drive versus the floppy disk. The floppy is based on the principle of magnetism, whereas the flash memory is based on the concept of "floating gate transistors" (don't ask me what that means, I'm a mech engineer, not a computer engineer. It's on wikipedia if you want more info ). Both function the same way. A person from the 1960's handling a flash drive could easily learn "this is analagous to a floppy" and work from there. At the same time, someone from 1900 could understand "this is kind of like a file folder that you carry with you."

Visibility plays a large role in determining whether or not people will feel out of place when dropped into a more advanced society, though. [snip] My original argument was about that 'out of place' feeling, and I maintain that there are practical limits on how far the underlying technology can change before the out of place aspect becomes significant. In our world, technology advances that far in less than a lifetime, and it shows when you see what happens to old people who don't make a conscious effort to move with the times. In Star Wars, it takes a lot longer.

This is something I was wanting to address. There are only so many technological "niches" that can be conceived at any one time. For instance, we look at computers as a constant. All our scifi has some iteration of a computer, usually better and smarter, often sentient. We have spacecraft, we have flying vehicles, etc. The one problem with scifi is that we have trouble thinking beyond our current era and knowledge. The 14th century had no concept of the sky except as heaven, so they had no concept of space travel in any of their fiction. The 17th century had very little idea of machines, so of course they wouldn't think of a machine that could think, too concerned with what they knew like heaven and earth. In year XXXX we will look back and say, "hey, those funny people in 2000 didn't even consider the fact that we'd be able to do [x]. Well, I suppose it's because they hadn't found [y] so obviously they wouldn't even think of [z]. As such, most of SW will seem static, because it is only dealing with the devices we can think of now, we just keep making them bigger and better, which will change their quality, but not the actual niche itself. Without the "20/20 hindsight," we can't really guess what will come, and thus we cannot really include it in our fiction. Do you see what I'm getting at? The fact that the last 4000 years of SW might seem static because the *writers* don't have the insight to anticipate what will eventually arise. As such, all we have are the cosmetic differences and the ever occasional glimpse at something that actually is world changing (like planetary shields, like the death star, like cybernetic advances, like cordless lightsabers, like surface to orbit weaponry, etc). The vast majority of increases, though, are in the betterment of existing niches. Afterall, during the last 100 years, what has actually changed how we live? Computers. Airplanes. Space Flight. Any others? Cars have advanced, but are still cars. Computers have allowed for advances in just about everything, but the other techs haven't actually created new niches. Phones are now wireless, but still act to communicate with anyone on a network. Space flight's come a long way, but hasn't impacted society except for knowing what's out there. As such, there may only be so many *new niches* over the 4000 years, but the existing niches could all increase exponentially. Afterall, the notion that the jedi could retain library of galactic knowledge of millions of worlds in a single room (even albeit a big room) would require storage capacity on an enormous scale. Afterall, a million worlds generating a million facts and figures to store on an increasing populace increases the amount of data to be stored faster than any physical space would allow. As such, there must be increasing storage capacity to keep up with the increasing knowledge. Especially when you consider that in KotOR II, you never found more than a handful of holographic logs on a single data card or computer console, even though the frequency of logs would suggest that there should have been hundreds contained over the operational period of Peragus. Yet 4000 years later, they waste memory space by recording SECURITY CAMERAS in the middle of the jedi sanctuary in full holographic imaging. This also suggests a massive increase.

I'm sorry to have rambled on like that, but I kind of got on a tangent. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say, though.
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C3-PO is best described, I think, as an idiot-savant whose savant field is language and communication styles. That creates a falsely exaggerated impression of his actual intelligence, because he sounds like someone who knows what he's talking about, until you actually stop to listen to what he's saying. And I don't think that's inconsistent with the description "not programmed to deal with the crap he's thrust into," either. A robot programmed to handle only one type of situations usually would be an idiot-savant, after all.

"Idiot Savant" is practically the definition of uber Intelligence/sub-par Wisdom. Just because someone would describe someone as stupid, doesn't mean that they are stupid in both regards. On this forum especially, simon, you should know the dangers of taking dialogue at face value (having been here longer than I)
This Debate also seems to be pointless, however. We are basically agreeing entirely, but arguing the semantics of what we are agreeing on...

you can catch up with the breakthroughs in invention they made 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, in much less time than it took them to make corresponding breakthroughs in the first place. Catching up will still take many years of effort; it's not easy. But it wouldn't even be possible if it weren't for the fact that duplicating technical infrastructure is easier than inventing it.

And no one's arguing this. What this all comes back down to is the original debate, which is how long this would take.
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I'm not saying the technology is mature. I'm saying that it exists, that they already have some clue of how to build devices that interface with the central nervous system to a limited extent. The refinement of that technology into something that can be used for fully functional prostheses is a major advance between the KOTOR era and the movie era, and I totally agree with you on that. But, once again, it's a "we award Dr. Bob the Galactic Lifetime Achievement Award for his groundbreaking work on prosthetics" advance, not a "that was the Stone Age, this is now when we have proper prosthetics" advance.

My point about the complexity of the prosthetics is this: it would take several breakthroughs to successfully create prosthetics, and even more to make them practical enough to hand out as normal surgery.

There are a few counter-examples; the one I can think of off the top of my head is Lando Calrissian's chamberlain on Bespin. Also, the question of precisely what "human-cyborg relations" actually means, though it could mean anything or nothing and have nothing to do with implants, strictly speaking.

Technically Lobot (such was his name) was using a much different device than what was shown in KotOR. That cybernetic device allowed him to interface the computer directly. Further, this isn't much of a counterexample because he is the only example found in the vast majority of star wars. Further, as I recall, the EU states that that specific implant he has presents a very high rejection rate (though I could be in error on this point). As for 3po, I think that it was primarily the fault of the writers of the time (similarly to using parsecs for time), though unlike the latter example, I don't think it has yet been explained by EU writers yet. I have a feeling that cyborg in this case (taking it from an in-universe perspective now) was more likely referring to a human-droid relations, but given he was programmed by a 9 year old, it is quite possible that this was Anakin's error.

Very likely, though you'd think the same would be true of prosthetics to some extent...

One advantage of prosthetics is that it is attached to your body rather than placed in your body. Further, for organ prosthetics, usually you're fucked if you don't get the new gizmo, so any risk involved in putting it in is necessitated. As for the advantages of prosthetics, the prosthetics commonly used in SW are roughly equivalent to the original limb (usually), unless they are either employed by the military or are found/applied over the black market. Further, the EU elaborates greatly on the intolerance and racism that exists against cyborgs. Droids are often seen as non-people (whether sentient or not), and this stigma begins to carry over to visible cyborgs. There is even an instance of this in the movies. Obi-wan (a wise old man figure) dismisses Vader's humanity offhand, simply because he is "more machine than man," ignoring the fact that everything that makes him a man (such as his brain and his connection to the force) are still very much intact. This racism and possibly illegal nature of prosthetics that actually augment one's self are both definite reasons to steer clear of them.
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See my reply immediately above, about not being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

By your own assessment, you believe that there should be some reasons why transporters would be still used in SW, and by what seems to be a consensus, SW should have invented them at some point. Since they do not exist in SW, it is logical that there is some reason why they no longer exist. The most logical reason is technological limitation. As such, the burden of proof falls to he who would claim that there is no limiting factor that would prevent them from being in use currently. If you can offer up another logical reason why transporters would no longer be in use, then by all means feel free to propose it. With that thought, though, I am content to forgo further debating of shield tech if you desire.

I have an image of large droid-operated cargo ships using transporters for pad-to-pad transfer of cargo containers, sort of like container ships today.

Just a few thoughts:
--To have larger designs, you need to have stronger materials that can withstand the forces due to acceleration. As such, large cargo ships suffer more from any possible material interference than smaller ones.
--Cargo ships are useless unless they take the cargo somewhere. Since the urban centers are one of the places we have proposed the most interference existing, and since I already mentioned warships as some of the least likely to be transport compatible, it seems both of the primary loading points for these theoretical cargo ships would be, by nature, the same ones which would be most likely to require physical landings to transfer cargo.
--The very power sources and engines of the craft they're mounted on may interfere with the transporters placed thereon.

I'm only saying the idea comes to mind as a possible application if any applications are possible. I'd guess that some are possible, but I cannot prove my guess beyond a reasonable doubt to someone whose natural inclination is to dismiss the technology as useless.

Quite to the contrary, actually. I am actually a huge proponent of transporters, and have been for years. If tied to power sources and computers like are found in SW, they could have tremendous application both as a weapon and as replicators on crack. However, the SW universe does not have transporters either in weaponized form or in transportation form, and so, as I mentioned above, there must be a reason for this in SW. Since tech limitation seems the most logical limiting factor, the burden of proof falls to he who wants to prove there isn't such a factor. As for the replicator-on-crack potential, there are descriptions of devices that function as replicators that are used (if for nothing else) in the building of the second death star. Mike's got more info about these on the main site. Since replicator and transporter technology are practically one in the same (replicators actually transport base food stuff or base metal out of the storage bays and rearrange the molecular structure just before it re-integrates), this leads credence to the idea that SW actually DID invent transporters, and also supports the notion that they recognized a significant way to utilize them, even if the transportation/weaponization uses found themselves at a technological dead end.

[Simon_Jester]

My original intention with this point was to illustrate that they likely couldn't boil the oceans and such. The overall statement "Could be either," however, seems to sum up where this particular debate has gone. I believe we have pretty much reached a consensus/stalemate that this particular instance can be argued in either direction, and thus I vote we suspend this debate for now.

Motion seconded, vote passes unanimously, 2/2.
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One problem, though, is that this assumes that they have someone teaching them. Especially in the scenario we are discussing, try sending an Englishman from the early 1800's (very start of the industrial revolution) and try to teach him how to build a computer.

Yes. This references back to the main topic of discussion, as opposed to the little tangential issue I was using to illustrate the idea of "small" technological gaps.

The way it's likely to work is this:
-Primitive society realizes how outclassed they are. Tries buying some of the advanced society's machines.
-Foreign exchange rate is ludicrously unfavorable, so they don't get many or good machines, and they don't really know how to maintain them.
-In real life, part of the problem is usually the lack of a social background that makes the machines useful, much as, say, the Muslim world lacked the framework of clock-centric, individualized labor that made it easy to put people in factories. Star Trek and Star Wars actually have far more in common socially than they do technically, so this is less of an issue here. Anyway...
-At this point, they start picking up an inferiority complex and trying to send students to foreign schools, which is one of the keys to the process... though you may have to start the kids extremely early so that they'll be prepared when they hit the really interesting stuff.

There's going to be a lot of pushing and shoving as the foreign-educated students and hired technicians try to set up a local infrastructure, but that is the essence of the process of how to explain advanced technology to primitives: you take the primitives at about the age of seven and systematically educate them, and by the time they hit their mid-twenties they are the ones who will have to explain the technology to their relatives. They aren't going to be all that good at it, either, but at least they speak the primitives' language better than you do.

Even if half of SW was static tech speaking (10,000 year dark age enough for conservative figures?), and even if it takes less than one tenth of the time to learn the stuff and integrate it than it did to invent it in the first place, that still leaves over 1000 years to catch up.

This is very much true if the pace of technological advancement in Star Wars during that time was ever comparable to the pace of advancement over the past two centuries in the Industrial West for very long. There's no way to make up ten thousand years of advancement in that speed in less than a thousand, I totally agree.

The only reason I consider the issue even slightly debatable is that I don't think there is much evidence for industrial West-speed technological advancement in Star Wars, except perhaps for extremely short bursts. Bringing a civilization from the "what's an atom?" stage to the "we have our own semiconductor fabricator" stage can be done in about 100 years, possibly 50 (the key examples here would be places like Taiwan and Korea, which were backwards provinces of pre-industrial empires until quite recently). If you had to do that a hundred times over to get them caught up it could not possibly be done in under a thousand years. If you only had to do that five or ten times over? That's another matter.
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[1] I understand. This just isn't enough to begin reproducing the technology in of itself. Afterall, there is a reason that we go to college for engineering degrees, and that is after having been immersed in modern technology and modern science since a young age. The main debate here isn't about sinking or swimming in a new environment, but being able to understand the properties that would allow a society to catch up technologically. To make a technology, you first have to understand the principles upon which it works.

Yes agreed (again, this is forcibly twisting the discussion back from my choice of example to illustrate small technical shifts back to the question of large technical gaps, and I'm OK with that).

The catch is that as long as people in the advanced society are capable of learning how to master their own technology- learn the underlying principles, understand what needs to be done to duplicate it even if the physical equipment to do it with is lacking- people in a primitive society can get their children to learn it too, if they start educating their children early enough. The generation that actually makes first contact is hopeless; they're never going to figure out the more advanced society on any level beyond "Wow, nice magic you've got there!" It's the second, third, and subsequent generations that actually have a hope of putting things together, assuming their parents were responsible enough to send some of them to the right schools.
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This I have never argued. What I have argued, is that the technology has increased on the non-visible level.

Yes, I agree. The minimum span over which advances in technology are comprehensible is defined by the span over which there is none of that. Flash drives did not exist in 1990, or existed only in a few specialized labs; back then the default medium of storage was the floppy disk. And you could probably explain a floppy disk's operating principles to a refugee from the '60s, I think (but am not certain of). They wouldn't be able to make new disks just by wanting to, but they would comprehend your toolkit on a level beyond "Wow, nice magic." (to use my earlier phrase).

They would not be able to do the same for the flash drive, I agree. I was trying to define the notion of "small technological advance" in terms of a gap narrow enough to be bridged easily on an individual basis (1960 to 1970, if nothing else), as opposed to one too wide to be bridged by individuals (1900 to 2010), unless those individuals were trained from childhood to do so. At some point, the "under the hood" advances are too large to be explained, but advances of that kind usually go with large advances in performance, if not in appearance. A spaceship engine might experience a 10-fold increase in performance without a change in its look... but in that case, while I may not see the change in appearance, I'm likely to notice the performance.
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This is something I was wanting to address. There are only so many technological "niches" that can be conceived at any one time. For instance, we look at computers as a constant. All our scifi has some iteration of a computer, usually better and smarter, often sentient. We have spacecraft, we have flying vehicles, etc. The one problem with scifi is that we have trouble thinking beyond our current era and knowledge. The 14th century had no concept of the sky except as heaven, so they had no concept of space travel in any of their fiction.

Well... you got the occasional story about flying to the moon on a chariot flown by swans, but that was mostly a sort of comic allegory. I once read a passage from a medieval romance about the legendary knight Roland that involved some of his companions going to the moon. But yes, I know what you mean, and it's a problem most science fiction fails to address. But unless we want to imagine our future societies as post-singularity, it's the only way to go.

As such, most of SW will seem static, because it is only dealing with the devices we can think of now, we just keep making them bigger and better, which will change their quality, but not the actual niche itself. Without the "20/20 hindsight," we can't really guess what will come, and thus we cannot really include it in our fiction. Do you see what I'm getting at? The fact that the last 4000 years of SW might seem static because the *writers* don't have the insight to anticipate what will eventually arise.

Yes, but at that level we can equally well argue that Star Trek is so much more primitive than Star Wars because the *writers* don't have the insight to understand the difference between a megaton-range nuke and a planet-crushing beam weapon. Meta-arguments invoking the writers' lack of imagination are often true, but they're death on all forms of analysis of fiction, not just the one I've been doing.

Also, since the stuff happening 4000 years before the movies was written after the movies, I think it's more of a case of "the writers decided not to say that any of the technology they had in the movies didn't exist 4000 years earlier." Which is a slightly different case, though I'm not sure exactly how to explain the differences.

As such, there must be increasing storage capacity to keep up with the increasing knowledge. Especially when you consider that in KotOR II, you never found more than a handful of holographic logs on a single data card or computer console, even though the frequency of logs would suggest that there should have been hundreds contained over the operational period of Peragus. Yet 4000 years later, they waste memory space by recording SECURITY CAMERAS in the middle of the jedi sanctuary in full holographic imaging. This also suggests a massive increase.

True. On the other hand, this can be handwaved as a gameplay issue (very few games that give you a book actually include a book's worth of text in the book; you're mostly reading selections from it). Also, the Jedi had massive archives even in the KOTOR era, and while they had less information to store then, they wouldn't have had orders of magnitude less, because they were already fifteen to twenty millenia old even then. Storage capacity could easily have improved by one order of magnitude, maybe even three or four... but necessarily six orders of magnitude (comparable to the improvements we've seen since 1900 in real life, at a rough guesstimate), let alone the huge improvements we'd expect to see from persistent application of Moore's Law-speed advances over millenial time scales.

I'm sorry to have rambled on like that, but I kind of got on a tangent. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say, though.

Oh, I do, and it makes sense. Again, if I thought we had reason to expect industrial West-speed technological advance in Star Wars over millenial time scales, I would never have suggested that anyone could catch up in a mere millenium. But I'm still not at all sure that we do. There definitely is change, it's not static, but you have to wait a thousand years (or at least several hundred) for those changes to become particularly noticeable.
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My point about the complexity of the prosthetics is this: it would take several breakthroughs to successfully create prosthetics, and even more to make them practical enough to hand out as normal surgery.

Conceded. I do not maintain that there was technological stasis over the 4000 years between KOTOR and the movies, only that the rate of advance was much slower than we, today, in the developed world, are accustomed to.

Technically Lobot (such was his name)... isn't much of a counterexample...

Agreed. I didn't think he was, and I concede your point on the implant issue. There are a few instances of implant technology in the movie era, but not many, so this is probably a technology that was ultimately discarded as not worthwhile. The mere fact that it existed shows the rudimentary beginnings of the fully functional prosthetics in the movie era, but the technology obviously had a long way to go before it reached the state of maturity that we see with, say, Luke's right hand.
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By your own assessment, you believe that there should be some reasons why transporters would be still used in SW, and by what seems to be a consensus, SW should have invented them at some point. Since they do not exist in SW, it is logical that there is some reason why they no longer exist. The most logical reason is technological limitation. As such, the burden of proof falls to he who would claim that there is no limiting factor that would prevent them from being in use currently. If you can offer up another logical reason why transporters would no longer be in use, then by all means feel free to propose it. With that thought, though, I am content to forgo further debating of shield tech if you desire.

The only alternative I can think of is rather weak, and I advance this purely as a basis for speculation, not as a basis for certainty:

Transporter technology may have been discarded in the distant past as unreliable when the technology did not exist to make it interference-resistant, even if the technology to do so exists today. There are historical examples of this in, for instance, military technology: siege engines in the medieval sense became obsolete with the invention of the cannon, because they could easily be knocked apart by even light defensive artillery. No one tried to build siege towers to attack a 17th-century fortification; it would have been idiotic.

The siege engine was not "reinvented" until the rise of the tank in World War I, with the early tanks bearing a strong resemblance in design concept to medieval siege engines (slow, well protected, and useful only for breaching a fortified line). Later tanks went beyond the siege engine concept and further usurped the cavalry role, but that takes us beyond the period I'm addressing.

So we have here a (limited, speculative) example of a technology that was once impossible to implement because it was too easy to counter, but that later became viable thanks to advances in the tools that would be used to create it, so that you could make a better version than your ancestors would have, one that could stand up to the problem that forced your ancestors to discard the concept.

And yet the tank was not developed as soon as it conceivably could have been by any means; no one said "Ah-ha! These new "engines" allow us to reinvent the siege engine in a form that can be used to assault fortifications defended by guns, as our ancestors assaulted fortifications defended by bows and spears!" And had it not been for the urgent need to break through enemy lines in a siege scenario rising from the trenches of World War I, tank development might have been delayed even further.

Something similar might (speculatively) have occured with transporters in Star Wars: while they would work well now, with proper modifications, they would not have worked well with the technology available in the past, and were dismissed as obsolete because the need for them was not sufficiently desperate to force people to go back to them. As with tanks in, say, 1905, this does not mean that they would be useless if anyone had actually gone to the trouble to build one.

And, just to underline this even more, this is all speculative and tentative, not a case of "This is the truth, and whoever claims it otherwise shall be cast into the outer darkness!" or any such overzealous nonsense.

[Wyrm]

You have chosen a very hard position to substantiate. Why are you finding it hard to believe that I demand equally hard evidence?

Because I am no longer convinced that your notion of the hardness of the position matches reality. You can decide that my burden of proof is whatever you want, and you can arbitrarily add to this burden as many times as you want. But you could do this in any case, regardless of whether I was right or wrong*. Nothing stops a person who is wrong from saying "I need more evidence!"

Indeed, many of the stupidest ways to be wrong in the world do exactly that, because as far as argument goes, it's the defense in depth to beat all defenses in depth. You don't have to be right; all you have be is savvy enough to find a way in which your opponent could hypothetically expand on their argument, then demand that they do so indefinitely. Up to a point, this kind of behavior is well warranted; there is a reasonable standard of evidence for every claim. Beyond that point they become nothing more than an excuse for keeping up an argument for the honor of the flag until the other party quits in disgust.

I see. You're trying to portray me as some kind of "I need more proof" automaton. However, anyone who has read my rebuttals (and knows what the hell a 'model' is) can see that I gave counterarguments to all your arguments. As long as you continue to fail to address those, you cannot expect anyone to take your argument seriously.

Anyone who knows the history of fusion power knows that predicting the amount of research that a given technology represents is a hard thing to substantiate. Practical fusion power has been fifty years away since fifty years ago. This, in a nutshell, is what makes your argument hard to take seriously: we can't even predict the arrival date of a technology that is only just slipping between our groping, future-reaching fingers — we don't know how much knowledge practical fusion power represents even though we have the best minds working on it and we know in broad strokes what the technology looks like.

So tell me, how the hell can anyone make predictions about when a civilization can gain a particular technology, when there are no exant experts in the field, and we don't even know how the technology works?

Sometimes the answer really is, 'We don't know, and we can't know.'

You saw fit to invoke an argument against the validity of the model I was using. So far, so good. But the argument in question was one that lowers the effective amount of time and effort required to reach high technology from a low starting point... which would tend to support lower estimates for how long it would take to catch up over high ones.

Up to here, I have no argument with you. No one has.

If you're trying to poke holes in my reasoning to show that I don't really have any, it seems odd of you to do so with arguments that support my conclusion and are in fact more generous than the ones I had adopted for the sake of the discussion.

You regard the fact that the exponential model does not factor in periods of regression as a decisive problem with both the exponential model and my reasoning, despite the fact that it favors my conclusion more than I do. That is an absurd objection: I am wrong because I forgot to include something that supports my conclusion.

You're a liar. You used my exponential model, which from the outset was only meant to demonstrate the general character of catching up to a specific technology, much further than it was intended to go. To be even minimumly useful, one would have to map the development of the target knowledge base to an exponential curve.

Why?

Because my exponential model assumes that the development of the target knowledge base really is exponential. If that requirement is not satisfied, all bets are off.

You're not wrong because you forgot to include a few little things that supports your conclusion, but rather you forgot the basic groundwork of it.

This is one of the points I am trying to hammer into your ball-peen head. In order for my model to work, you need to be able to map the scientific advancement of the SW galaxy to some normalized scale of scientific knowledge. You spuriously equated knowledge with power. However, anyone with a brain can see that while knowing more gives us leverage to know even more — by knowing where to look for further discoveries, the power output of our civilization is limited by other factors, including how much coal, oil, and uranium we can produce, how many power plants we can economically build and sustain, and so on.

If you're willing to use absurd objections along with valid ones, then we could be at this for months, even if I was indisputably right by the standards of everyone debating the question in good faith.**

You can argue against my position for a very long time in this way, limited only by your own supply of foolishness, and you are more than clever enough to generate unlimited folly if you so choose.

** Which I do not contend that I am, only that you do not meet those standards.

"Whine whine whine Wyrm's objections are absurd blah blah blah." Anyone with a basic grounding in mathematics knows that if a model doesn't fit, you have to dump it, and a model that comes with fair warning against practical use ought to be used only if you really know what you're doing. Except that you have aptly demonstrated that you DON'T know what you're doing by conflating ratio of power generation with ratio of knowledge, and treating the technological advancement of the SW galaxy as exponential when you haven't done the first thing to establish that it really is exponential.

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Why do you find the position this unreasonable? Knowledge has been effectively removed from the galaxy at least once, and probably twice. We have only snapshots of the technology in the EU, whose events only (and sporatically) cover the last 5000 years of the galaxy — all the other parts of the SW timeline we know of come from references in the EU. Indeed, only the period of 40 BBY on can be considered to be well-covered. Only ten books cover the entire period of 5000-44 BBY. The pre-5000 BBY period is not covered first-hand at all.

I don't see anything wrong with that, but when we apply it, it only makes playing catch-up to them easier, not harder.

In this case, your own argument against my position doubles as an argument for my position, because it reduces the amount of time needed to reach the Star Wars level of technology from a primitive starting point. That cuts down on the amount of effort, because a galaxy clawing its way back out of the Dark Ages in a few millenia can't supply as many man-years of research (or research publications) as one that has been continuously hammering away at scientific problems progressively for twenty-five.

That's the funniest thing I've heard in ages! Listen up, squirt, and you may learn something.

First off, I made no claim that clawing back up from a Dark Age would take "a few millenia." You came up with this figure all by yourself. The Old Republic from which the Empire sprang lasted 25000 years BBY, and is incompatable with a Dark Age during which most of the technology was lost. There is also an unknown lead time to when galactic technology allowed the Old Republic to function. The argument for busts is mostly aimed squarely at your 4000 year figure for 1/β, based on 100,000 years for the lifetime of the SW galactic civilization.

Secondly, your 1200 year figure for 1/β came from the same bogus argument you used to find α, that the knowledge required to build the technology scales with the power output of the technology. You consistently fail to address this very fundamental flaw in your analysis, which means that I cannot take your 1200 year figure seriously. This uncouples the <2e9-fold increase in power technologies from the increase in scientific knowledge it took to produce it.

To expand on the point, the power output of hypermatter reactors appear to scale with the size of the reactor. This indicates a mature power technology, and that the only limits on the technology is with the theoretical power density. In other words, even a billionfold increase in knowledge will not increase the power density of hypermatter reactors. This gives us, thirdly, that there does seem to be an End of Physics problem in SW — at least until someone stumbles upon the next big power technology.

Thus forthly, because α and β are completely uncoupled from the 2e9-fold increase in power technologies, we still cannot pin down how long it will take for the ST powers to catch up. Your analyses have been an utter failure.

The point, you cretinous little clown, is that your method of finding the coefficient of knowledge growth in the Star Wars galaxy, β, is deeply flawed. Not only does it assume that an increase in power implies a proportional increase in knowledge — and hence, "inherits all of the problems of your analysis of α" — but it neglects that there are documented subtractions of galactic knowledge, again meaning that my model is deficient in many significant ways... which I warned about right when I presented the damn thing.

I contend that this is less of a problem with the model than you believe, as we can replace the entire Star Wars side of the model with a constant, provided we can estimate the magnitude of that constant relative to where the benighted Trekkers are, assuming an exponential growth curve in technology as a function of time on the Trek side of the line.

And I contend that your use of the model, intended to produce believable figures for α and β, has failed to do so is a very large problem in your argument. It's like arguing that the hole in the middle of your chest is not as big as the 10 cm diameter I claim. It's still a damn big hole in a damned important part of you.

Thing is, you assume that what was exponentially increasing in my model was the capabilities of the technology itself, however, a careful reading of the model indicates something far different:

Let t be the amount of time that the Federation spends learning to achieve parity with (say) the Empire, and let α be the learning rate parameter given a teaching Empire. Let T be the amount of time that the Star Wars galaxy has spent in exponential growth of knowledge, and β be its expansion parameter. Then, parity is achieved when

exp(αt) = exp(βT)

...

The above model ignores a lot of relevant detail, but its essense should be clear.

In other words, the model models knowledge growth, not technology growth. While the two are related, the relation is too fuzzy to be any use to predict when a given civilization will get a given technology from first principles.

Of course, the model still works in terms of time and the products of technology, and not in terms of papers published or bytes of data stored;

Naked assertion. My model was never intended to give such answers, and anyone with a mediocrim of mathematical sense could see that from the model description: that the model was talking about knowledge increase and not technology increase. At best, it may only be used to set knowledge milestones, based on when the teaching civlization achieved those same milestones.

If we were interested in discovery it would be critical; when nation A publishes only 1% as many physics papers as nation B it's a very safe bet that A is hideously backward in physics compared to B. If nation A is so limited as to have only 1% of the archived papers B does, even more so.

But when we are concerned with infrastructure development and the creation of tools to make the tools, the relation between volume of published research and the effort required to upgrade one's equipment to reflect that research is not so simple. A great deal of research may boil down to a single concept, process or technique that can be implemented without painstaking reconstruction of all the trial and error that went into the original version.

So long as we stay within the realm of technology human beings can learn to master at all, there will remain points at which an summary of the knowledge base up to a certain point is sufficient to proceed, even if one has not looked at everything that went into the summary. Otherwise progress in science and technology would already be nearly impossible; even reading all the literature on many subjects back to their earliest beginnings would take a prohibitive amount of time, let alone actually understanding it all.

We make up for that using textbooks and reference books that present the mass of literature in condensed form, even though the literature is already a condensed form of the labor that went into the original research and design work.

Condensation of knowledge only gets you so far. We also solve the problem by narrowing the field — specialization. Long gone are the days when a single man can learn all of physics. To make it nowadays, a scientist needs to specialize in a narrow field of study in order to get good enough to start contributing meaningfully. Summarizing the learning alleviates the problem of learning, but specialization amplifies it. In any one field like all of physics, one can only hope to become the leading expert in a very small plot of knowledge within it. The task is just too big otherwise.

Also, not only is the total bulk of knowledge so huge compared to your personal mastery of it, as speciallized knowledge becomes more nuanced and subtle, the wider your foundation needs to be to truly understand it. Understanding how hyperspace physics works, for instance, will undoubtibly require understanding of mind-bending mathematics beyond the basic calculus, and probably a smattering of particle physics and its foundations. In this case, while condensation will ease learning of any particular topic, the topic base required for specialization in a field will require a large foundation of those topics.

In other words, even condensed, all of science is still a fuckload of knowledge.

Repair for a hyperdrive, for instance, would undoubtibly require the very specialized tools, training, and parts. The scientific knowledge this represents will be mostly embodied in the tools and the parts — black boxes one would rather replace than repair. You can achieve the training relatively easily. To make the tools and parts —not obtain them, make them— you need to master the knowledge they embody with respect to the parts and tools needed to create them, and down a very long ladder of knowledge.

Claiming a linear relationship between the difficulty of creating a technological product and the number of research papers written on the subject before it could be created doesn't make more sense than claiming a linear relationship to electrical power output did; at least electrical power output is a technological product.

So you admit that the two bear no clear relation to each other, and specifically there is no linear relation between a technology and the knowledge it embodies. Concession accepted.

Your objection would be valid if one had to master all the papers related to a device to use the device, or to build it. One does not, not when the blueprints already exist.

You still need training to understand the blueprints, cupcake. Do you know what a "3/4 guage Abotech wankel-funkometer" is? And of course, if you're going to make the "3/4 guage Abotech wankel-funkometer", you need the blueprints for that stage down. But to build the correct assembly line for a "3/4 guage Abotech wankel-funkometer", you need to know what the material "Jazzon" is, what is needed to grind/cast/whatever it properly, and so on.

If you just want to get the time the feddies take to integrate themselves into the greater galactic economy, it can be shockingly short —as short as a decade— if you allow foreign investors to come in and build factories, foundaries, and refineries en masse. But then the Federation will simply become an additional part of the galactic melting pot. If you want the feddies to bild themselves up into a culturally distinct, fully self-sufficient power amongst the SW, then they need the full gamut of knowledge the SW technologies represent, plus all the tools and starter materials they can afford.

But how much seed materials/knowledge can the Federation afford? What does the economic growth curve look like? How fast can the Federation exploit its own resources? Raise the standard of living of its citizens fast enough to stave off revolt/emmigration of the best and brightest?

Since I did not say it before in an obvious enough way for you to notice,

You made a claim and seriously defended it. Looked, walked and quacked like a duck, sparky.

I will make up the lack now:

I do not contend that this estimate of a <1000 year time frame for a Star Trek power to catch up with Star Wars level technology given exposure to that technology and freedom from outright conquest is a universal or certain truth. I believe it to be true, and I believe that rough calculations are at least somewhat supportive of it, but I do not possess a universally applicable model of technological advancement, or a complete enough dataset to provide a mathematical proof, in the sense that I could prove that, say... Spoiler

A uniformly filled ellipsoidal bunch of charge in a beamline will have a parabolic line charge density, with peak charge density &lambda;0 = 3qN/4zm, where N is the total number of particles in a bunch and zm is the longitudinal half-length of the bunch.

I don't give a shit about the kind of problems you need to solve within your specialization. I only care about what claims you advance and make all seriousness to defend in this forum.

If you really can solve the above problem, then you should've realized long ago that my model does has so many shortcomings that it's only useful for illustration. That means you're not engaging me seriously.

If you can't, then you are lying to me.

Either way, I want no part of you. Again, sucks to be you.

[Thraxis]

The way it's likely to work is this:
-[snip]
-At this point, they start picking up an inferiority complex and trying to send students to foreign schools, which is one of the keys to the process... though you may have to start the kids extremely early so that they'll be prepared when they hit the really interesting stuff.
-There's going to be a lot of pushing and shoving as the foreign-educated students and hired technicians try to set up a local infrastructure, but that is the essence of the process of how to explain advanced technology to primitives: you take the primitives at about the age of seven and systematically educate them

I will point out, though, a couple of issues I see with this:
--Millions of planets by hundreds of millions (billions?) of inhabitants yields a massive number of innovations in every walk of life (even assuming only a fraction of these quadrillions of people can contribute). As such, I have a feeling you may need more kids than ST has available in order to effectively master every aspect of the technology using this approach. As such, I would propose that it would require layers of this approach, having the first generation uncover the first layer of tech, then the next uncovering, etc. Slowly stripping away layers of the intervening years.
--True education comes from a college-level education, which almost always costs $$$. I'm not sure the Federation (being communist) would have the money to send the kids to a good school. And since I doubt very much the Imperial schools would accept gold-pressed latinum instead of credits, the federation would have a tough time ahead of them in that regard.
--Further, even those who get Imperial jobs and such to earn credits 1.) likely won't earn enough to pay for college easily (the vicious cycle that always plagues capitalist nations) and 2.) are the most prone to cultural conversion, quite possibly forsaking their federation roots. As such, not all the fed kids would actually help.
--The empire would likely not actively support the increase in federation tech unless they had already been absorbed into its governing body, at which point the debate would be moot anyway, because any resistance from then on would be simply more support for the rebellion, nothing new.

This is very much true if the pace of technological advancement in Star Wars during that time was ever comparable to the pace of advancement over the past two centuries in the Industrial West for very long. There's no way to make up ten thousand years of advancement in that speed in less than a thousand, I totally agree.

And so we have come full circle again, turning back towards the debate of how much SW advanced.

If you had to do that a hundred times over to get them caught up it could not possibly be done in under a thousand years. If you only had to do that five or ten times over? That's another matter.

So I guess we agree on time, we just disagree over whether the model applies to SW.
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At some point, the "under the hood" advances are too large to be explained, but advances of that kind usually go with large advances in performance, if not in appearance. A spaceship engine might experience a 10-fold increase in performance without a change in its look... but in that case, while I may not see the change in appearance, I'm likely to notice the performance.

Performance is not always something you can so easily observe. For instance, just because hyperdrive velocity hasn't improved by more than 2 orders of magnitude (an upper limit), this doesn't mean that it can't have increased in efficiency and size almost exponentially. There are a number of "under the hood" advances that can affect almost any device that don't show visibly. Increased speed is not necessarily "under the hood" because it can be easily observed. For all we know, though, hyperdrives may require orders of magnitude less energy, incorporate other subsystems into themselves that weren't previously present, and take up less space than before. Incorporate these sort of advances into all branches of tech (including the fact that quad lasers were shown as turbolaser sized on the Leviathan and yet they are much smaller than that on the Falcon), and you get a lot of "under the hood" advancement that wouldn't affect the performance an outside observer like ourselves would be able to see.
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Also, since the stuff happening 4000 years before the movies was written after the movies, I think it's more of a case of "the writers decided not to say that any of the technology they had in the movies didn't exist 4000 years earlier." Which is a slightly different case, though I'm not sure exactly how to explain the differences.

This was actually the point I was getting at. The writers couldn't decide whether the republic looked like ancient Greece after existing for 20000 years (wtf?), or whether everything is practically as it is in the movie era. The space between these two scenarios is a pitiful 1000 years (Great Hyperspace War shown in the Dark Horse comics versus the KotOR video game). I suspect that in this case, it was more of Bioware wanting to play star wars, but one of the writers for the game had a thing for the Old Republic era being established by the comics. From an in-universe perspective, this point is moot, but I brought it up only to point out that the KotOR games may present a universe which is deceptively advanced more because the designers "wanted traditional SW" than out of true concern for realism of the time frame.

True. On the other hand, this can be handwaved as a gameplay issue (very few games that give you a book actually include a book's worth of text in the book; you're mostly reading selections from it). Also, the Jedi had massive archives even in the KOTOR era, and while they had less information to store then, they wouldn't have had orders of magnitude less, because they were already fifteen to twenty millenia old even then. Storage capacity could easily have improved by one order of magnitude, maybe even three or four... but necessarily six orders of magnitude (comparable to the improvements we've seen since 1900 in real life, at a rough guesstimate), let alone the huge improvements we'd expect to see from persistent application of Moore's Law-speed advances over millenial time scales.

Oh? Several factors for you to consider: Population growth is currently 1.19% per year. At that rate, after a thousand years, population would increase by 5 orders of magnitude. After 4000, it would have increased by 20. The larger the population, the more people are famous, the more people are wanted for crime, the more people are noteworthy enough to be archived in records, the more people are writing literature to be stored in the archives' library portion, the more jedi there are to contribute there logs to the task. Not only this, but the number of planets explored, colonized, and analyzed increases during the intervening time.

The only alternative I can think of is rather weak, and I advance this purely as a basis for speculation, not as a basis for certainty:
Transporter technology may have been discarded in the distant past as unreliable when the technology did not exist to make it interference-resistant, even if the technology to do so exists today.

Weak? Quite the contrary, really. This is actually stronger than you give it credit for. If one takes a logical argument, and tries to argue against it, the burden of proof falls to he who would disprove it. So previously, your "I think SW is awesome enough to overcome interference problems" did not help disprove the logical conclusion of transporters being simply too flawed to work in a Wars society. This new argument, though, cites historical precedent, explains the facts (transporters should be in Wars's reach, but don't exist), and gives a clear, logical alternative to the current theory. The Burden of Proof would then fall to me if I cared to disprove it. For me personally, though, I would rather say "Either theory could work, let's just call it a stalemate and move on."